Picts

Picts were an important--though not well documented--part of the history of early medieval Scotland.  They were there when the Romans moved into Britain in the first centuries AD, and our name for them (Picts) comes from the Latin, because the Romans called them "painted people" (same root as 'picture').  We don't know what they called themselves.

(I assume that costume dramas set in medieval Scotland paint the hero's face blue because of the Picts.  But this still doesn't explain why he's wearing a modern kilt.)

The Picts were distinct from the Scots.  The former were over on the eastern side of what is now Scotland, while the Scots, a Gaelic/Celtic people from Ireland, were over on the west.  Not surprisingly, the two groups have become genetically mingled in the last 1500 years, but those who can boast of "pure Pictish" blood do so at every opportunity.

Both Picts and Scots were Christianized as the Roman Empire overall was Christianized, especially in the third and fourth centuries.  Indeed, what is now Scotland remained Christian after a lot of England became pagan with the invasions of the Angles and Saxons in the fifth and sixth centuries.  The Picts erected great stone crosses along their roads.  These roads are now narrow country lanes, but they were thoroughfares in the early Middle Ages.

The Picts also erected stones telling of glorious battles (apparently).  It's kind of ironic that a battle would be important enough to go to the great deal of trouble required in carving its story on a stone, but we now have no idea when or where the battle took place, or even who won.  Was it a battle between Scots and Picts?  Picts and Northumbrians? (from what is now northern England).  Between different groups of Picts?  We will never know (there's a reason historians like written records).

The above is a casting of the back of the same stone cross (the casting shows detail a little better than does the original).  The cross is in the churchyard of the church of Aberlemno, where it has apparently been since first carved.  The stone is about 10 feet high.

Dozens of Pictish stones still exist, some in museums, some still out along the lanes.  They are all carved with a variety of what are now called "Pictish symbols" because we don't exactly know what they mean.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval Britain, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Sword fighting

Too frequently costume dramas set (supposedly) in the Middle Ages have people fighting with thin fencing foils, the fighters alternating clangs against each other's sword.  Sometimes the swords are shown as more like medieval swords, sharp blades, but the fighters still (erroneously) fence the same way (using aluminum swords) in many a movie or TV show.  The image below is a medieval-style sword, which you will notice is not a fencing foil; see more here on swords.

Sword fighting was a highly technical skill, which was why medieval warriors started training young.  In practice the purpose was not to clang one's sword against the other's but rather to kill him, disarm him, or at least force him to yield.  There were a great many different ways of doing so.

We have multiple manuals of sword-fighting from the late Middle Ages.  These were not "sword fighting for beginners" but rather books with brief descriptions of different approaches, stances, and techniques.  One would learn sword fighting from a master, then acquire (or create) a manual with brief descriptions of key points, to help one practice or recall how things were supposed to go.

These manuals are being extensively studied at The Armouries in Leeds, England, a museum that holds the armor once stored at the Tower of London.  People with fencing experience work out what the manuals are suggesting, then try them out to see if they work.  With practice, so that the movements come very quickly and smoothly, they work very well.

One thing the manuals indicate, which might not have been self-evident, is that one can grab the blade of either one's own or the opponent's sword without getting cut, if one holds on rather than sliding one's hand (try it with a steak knife, just not a serrated one.)  Most fights are over very quickly, as one person or the other gains a very brief advantage in the fast-paced fighting.

The image below is of two of the fighters at the Armouries demonstrating their technique.

They are using steel medieval-style two-handed swords, light enough to swing around, sturdy enough for use in heavy whacking (a single long piece of steel from pommel to sword-point, so they won't crack off at the handle as "medieval-look" swords often do).

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval fighting, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Trees in the Middle Ages

Europe probably has more trees now than it had in the thirteenth century.  The last of the old-growth forests are long gone, but a lot of less-fertile agricultural land has been allowed to return to woodland.  With modern hybrid seed and fertilizers, far more food can be grown per acre than was the case 800 years ago, meaning that less land needs to be cultivated even with the increased population.

Trees were very important in the Middle Ages, even though the normal reaction to wilderness was concern and even fear (unlike today's frequent embrace of wilderness as soul-cleansing).  Trees were necessary for beams for churches--the fire at Notre Dame that destroyed the roof burned up 1300 beams from twelfth-century oaks taller than almost any tree now found in Europe.  Because heating and cooking was done over wood fires, firewood was constantly being gathered (another reason there were fewer trees then than now).  The forest was also a source of food, nuts, berries, mushrooms, and the like, and acorns were prized as food for the pigs that essentially ran wild while getting fattened up.

Timbers were needed for houses of course as well as for churches.  Although most of the buildings that survive today from the Middle Ages are stone, wood was also heavily used at the time, being cheaper and easier to use.  Ordinary people couldn't afford (and didn't need) massive beams, but they needed wood to make a framework, often filled in with clay, rubble, or plaster.

A lot of things that are now made out of plastic or metal were then made out of wood, including furniture, storage containers, fish weirs that would trap fish, poles for vines to climb on, and the like.  Trees were often pollarded, that is had branches cut off so that it would produce a lot of slim young branches, which were useful for things like poles for the vines or fish weirs.  Although pollarding has essentially stopped now, if you look at Impressionist paintings of trees you will notice they still, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, seemed to have had an awful lot of small branches growing out of a thick trunk.

Trees were also used to make charcoal.  Charcoal will burn a lot hotter than wood, and it was thus needed to be able to work iron or to blow glass, before the days of the modern oil-fired blast furnace.  Charcoal burners would level a large patch of forest and then burn the green wood slowly, so that it would burn down into charcoal rather than all being consumed.

Europe's trees in the Middle Ages were mostly the same mix seen today.  Olive trees were valued along the Mediterranean.  Evergreens were found at all high elevations and were tapped for resin.  Chestnuts prospered in the woods, as did beeches, ashes, and oaks.  Orchard were planted with apples and other fruit trees.  Trees often took on holy or at least mythic significance.  The Crucifixion was often described as Jesus hanging from a "tree," and indeed it was sometimes said that his cross was made from the wood of the Tree of Knowledge from which Adam and Eve unwisely ate.  In Norse mythology, there was a great "world tree" (named Yggdrasil, their trees got to have names) whose branches spread out over the gods, humans, and giants.


© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on the medieval environment, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Medieval Warfare

There were a lot of wars in the Middle Ages.  (The same thing of course could be said about the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.)  They were not nearly as destructive to infrastructure as modern warfare, and a lot of them were small and local, but they were certainly hellacious both for participants and for innocent bystanders.

One major distinction between medieval and modern warfare is that the medieval male aristocracy defined itself militarily by the twelfth century.  That is, anyone who was rich and powerful also wanted to be seen as a warrior, specifically a knight, someone who fought on horseback.  This is unlike today's wealthy men, who seek various ways to avoid having to go to war.

Gunpowder and cannons started being used in warfare in the fourteenth century, but before then the chief weapons were swords and lances.  Lances were used to knock other knights off their horses once cavalry began to dominate warfare.  Swords were used to slash and kill--the fencing you see in Three Musketeers movies is post-medieval.  You could also kill people with arrows, although armor provided a lot of protection.  Because archers killed from a distance, a bow was considered a coward's weapon.  This did not keep all medieval armies from marching with a contingent of archers.

Most battles were fought by the infantry in the early Middle Ages, and at least theoretically all free men were supposed to be ready to march off to war if needed.  The Roman army had been a foot-soldier army, and this preponderance of infantry continued until the stirrup made horseback fighting viable in the tenth and later centuries.  Major battles were won by the infantry, and in the battle of Hastings of 1066, when the Normans conquered England, the Anglo-Saxon infantry came extremely close to winning.  (They probably would have won if they hadn't just fought and won a battle in the north of England, then marched south very fast to face the Normans.)

Cavalry then dominated warfare throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but with the spread of cannons in the late Middle Ages infantry again became very important.  They weren't wanted for their fighting skills so much as to be cannon fodder, to march against the cannons, get shot and die, giving the cavalry and the archers a chance to charge while the slow reloading was going on.  (There were no rifles or handguns for centuries to come.)

In extended wars (like the Hundred Years War), the armies lived off the land, burning crops and devastating the countryside.  But for smaller wars, especially in the twelfth century when the Crusades were still seen as a viable way to be a warrior without killing Christians, there was at least an intermittent effort to avoid attacking the helpless.  For the peasantry, however, war was always awful.

A lot of battles involved castles.  Castles, like knights, first appeared in the eleventh century.  They were primarily defensive, and castle architecture tended to develop just fast enough to keep ahead of advances in siege technology.  Many castles were never attacked at all, and those that fell usually fell due to betrayal or to the garrison being starved out.  Castles could also be used as staging areas for sorties and attacks.

Naval battles occurred in the Middle Ages but were rare.  The Mediterranean was notoriously unpredictable, and few other than Vikings would venture far out into the Atlantic.


© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval knights and warfare, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Heresy and Orthodoxy

The word "orthodox" makes one think of Greek Orthodoxy or Russian Orthodoxy (and there are other versions of Christianity with Orthodoxy in their names), but the word actually means correct religion, as opposed to heresy.  Heresy is incorrect religion.  How do you tell the difference?

There is and can be no absolute guide.  You can tell which was the true religion by who won.  Obviously God wouldn't let the wrong guys win, everyone said (and says).  Alternately, however, the Bible talks about "when two or three are gathered in my name...." so maybe the tiny minority is right and the self-styled winners are wrong and going to hell.  Guess we'll find out!

Heretics are specifically people who should know the true religion but have gone seriously astray.  So different versions of Christianity can (and often do) label each other as heresy.  Latin Christendom and Greek Orthodoxy excommunicated each other in 1054 and have only recently started getting back together.  (Protestants and Catholics have also decided that the other side isn't really a bunch of heretics.  Or not too heretical.)  So Christianity considers Islam not a heresy but a different religion, and Muslims aren't heretics but infidels.  Pagans, those who believe in multiple gods, are also not technically heretics.  This has never stopped the word "heretic" being tossed around a lot for anyone someone disagrees with.

Early Christianity had a lot of heresies.  Some of the most serious were so-called Christological heresies, arguments over the nature of Christ.  Was he just an inspired human?  Was he God in disguise?  Did he really die on the Cross or, if he was God the whole time, was it just a big charade?  If he was an inspired human who did rise again from death, should we pray to him rather than directly to God or is that a big mistake?  Are God and Jesus both gods, separate ones--and what about the Holy Spirit?  The efforts of the Council of Nicaea (325) to define the Trinity, one God in three persons, Jesus both fully human and fully divine, tried to settle the matter and just led to a lot of new heresies.  Most only ended with the rise of Islam in the seventh century, when a lot of territories that had been Christian under the Roman empire instead had Islam as their dominant religion, making a lot of the arguing irrelevant.

Other early Christian heresies included pelagianism, the idea that you could save yourself by being as good as you possibly could without needing grace (via the sacraments), and donatism, the belief that sacraments (which you needed) could only be validly administered by a pure priest, so if the priest had secretly sinned they didn't count.  These were also more or less wiped out once Islam gave people more things to think about than theological niceties.  Pelagianism had been especially strong in Roman Britain, until the arrival of the pagan Angles and Saxons ended that issue.

Another serious heresy was manichaeism, the idea that the universe was locked in a battle between absolute good and absolute evil, which neither would ever win, and that the spiritual world was good and the physical world evil.  There is a fair amount of dualism (the idea of two equal powers fighting it out) in orthodox Christianity, but this is heresy.

A lot of early Christian doctrine was worked out in response to heresy.  Someone would announce a new insight into religious issues no one had really thought about much, a church council would meet, discuss, decide it was wrong, and settle on an official doctrine of the opposite.  (This is how for example it was decided that the Christian Bible would include the Old Testament, the Jewish Bible, even though Christians felt they had "moved beyond" a lot of it.)  Thus heresy (and the reaction to it) helped define orthodoxy.

A version of Manichaeism took root in southern France in the twelfth century, among people who thought they were good Christians and that God's true message had finally been revealed to them.  This version is often called Catharism (from catharsis, a freeing or purging of oneself from troublesome things), and the Albigensian Crusade was launched against it in 1209 (on which see more here).

My husband and I have written a novel, Count Scar, set in a fictional version of southern France in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade--except with magic.  We've moved the geography around some, and all the people are fictional; the single biggest change we made was not getting into northern France's invasion of southern France in this crusade.  (The book is available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.)

We're finishing a sequel, Heretic Wind, for anyone who enjoys the first one.  Coming soon!

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on real medieval heresy, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Tiny Houses

There's a trend now to "tiny houses."  Of course most people aren't interested in such things, except perhaps as a backyard studio (for one thing, where would you put all the Stuff?), but the idea of a radically simple lifestyle, a few hundred square feet with just enough space for a tiny kitchen, a bed, a place to sit and a place to eat, has a certain appeal.

Now if a tiny house is going to function today it needs plumbing and electricity and a stove and a refrigerator, at a minimum.  Medieval people (most of them) lived in what we'd call tiny houses, but it wasn't because it was trendy.  It was because that's what houses were like.

Okay, a medieval castle was a pretty big building.  But let's face it.  Most of us our ancestors were peasants, living not in castles but in what we would probably be more likely to describe as a "hut" than a "cottage."  They didn't have plumbing or electricity or stoves or refrigerators or furnaces.  They did however have a place to sleep and a place to sit and a place to eat.  Cooking could either take place over an indoor fire (usually an open fire in the middle of the room rather than in a fireplace) or over an outdoor fire out back.  There might be a spring house to keep things cool, but there was no refrigeration.  There was certainly no plumbing.  There might not even be a privy, though there was always the handy dung heap.

These houses were usually made out of wattle and daub, sticks (not big pieces of wood) woven together and filled in with mud, plaster, or dung, and maybe some stones or old Roman bricks.  (See more here on medieval building materials.)  The floor would be dirt.  You had to be a fancy person to have a tile floor.  Peasants did not however like being dirty, and archaeology has revealed that the floors of a lot of these houses were vigorously swept so much that one might have to step down to get in from outside.

We think of houses in the US as being free standing, but medieval peasants' houses were usually snuggled up to the barn, where the animals were kept.  They didn't actually share their space with animals (other than maybe a cat), but the animals were right on the other side of the wall.  This both made it easier to take care of them and provided extra body heat in the winter.

In town, houses were built right up next to each other.  They might be a little bigger than a peasant's house, in that they could be two or three stories tall, but a lot of people would live in one of those houses, and they were very close to their neighbors.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on peasants and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see the ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon.

Medieval Medicine

There were two main forms of medical practitioners in the Middle Ages, as I've mentioned before, the highly-trained theoretical ones, and the ones with practical experience but little training.  In the first group were those who attended medical school—Salerno and Montpellier both had medical schools by the thirteenth century (and indeed still do).  The second group included barber-surgeons and midwives.  And then there were those somewhere in between.

Much theoretical medicine was based on ancient texts, especially Aristotle.  People who had never looked at an actual dissected body looked at drawings in books and believed them.  One recurrent problem was that the drawings of what was supposed to be the human liver actually portrayed a pig's liver—you can tell the difference because a pig's liver has lots of protruding lobes, which the human liver does not.

Much theoretical medicine was based on the theory of "humours," the four fluids that were supposed to shape not only one's health but one's personality:  blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.  The idea went back to Hippocrates.  We still use the terms "sanguine" (meaning confident) and "phlegmatic" (meaning rather calm and unemotional), personality traits associated with the predominance of one of the humours.  For medical purposes, it was believed that many ills could be cured by rebalancing the humours, which is why bleeding was long practiced as a way to cure people for whom blood had (supposedly) become too dominant.

Theoretical medicine also assumed that nature gave us hints about curative properties.  So caraway seeds were thought to help cure infertility if glued to one's thigh, the idea being that the seed shape would inspire other seeds to take root.  (The church considered reliance on caraway seeds a heresy.  This didn't stop it.)  If medieval doctors had had kidney beans (they didn't, as they are New World), they would have confidently (even sanguinely) said that they were good against kidney disease.

Medically trained doctors also believed that the worse the disease, the more powerful the medicine needed to be.  If one were given a good dose of mercury, it's true that you wouldn't have to worry about dying of the bubonic plague.

Barber-surgeons, on the other hand, had a good practical knowledge of how the human body worked from having cut up a few.  The prohibition against dissecting bodies only started during the Protestant Reformation.  Barber-surgeons had lots of sharp knives, used both for shaving and for surgery, and they would cut up living people too, to get rid of cancer or to deliver a breech baby (one might survive the former, maybe, but not the latter).  They of course did not have anesthesia or what we would call sterile conditions, though they did try at least for the latter.  After all, even though they didn't know about bacteria (no one did until the nineteenth century), they certainly knew about infection.

Cataracts might be treated by applying a hot iron to the eye.  Thanks, I'll stick with modern approaches.

Midwives delivered babies and dealt with other feminine ailments.  They were big fans of caraway seeds.  Women gave birth sitting up (or reclining) rather than lying on their backs with their feet in the air (the twentieth-century method), which gave gravity a chance to help out.  Maternal mortality was higher than in the modern West but lower than in the nineteenth century, when doctors would give women in labor lots of chloroform, having come straight themselves from trying to treat someone with an infectious disease, without washing up.

Then there was the help-the-sick-stay-warm-and-clean approach adopted at hospitals, of which a number were built between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.  They were generally staffed by nuns; British nurses are still called Sister.  Here the ill were fed chicken soup and sprinkled with saint dust and, with luck, their immune systems would kick in and they'd feel better.  (See more here on medieval hospitals.)

People working at the hospitals tried to create good combinations of herbs that might be medicinal.  They would watch what plants animals ate to see what might be safe.  A typical medicine might be dried quince, rose syrup, and ginger, all cooked together in wine.  (Had to be better than mercury.)

The above is a cabinet of medicinal herbs at a medieval hospital.


© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval health and hygiene and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.